Suspects All !

by Helen Mulgray

  ‘This is absolutely frightful. He’s showing no consideration for others!’ Scooping up the newly refilled teapot, Celia flounced off to rejoin her protégée.

  After that, it had been impossible to concentrate on writing up the desk diary. In fact, I’d found Grant’s loud one-sided conversation so irritating that a large chunk of it had burned itself into my memory.

  ‘Fifty boxes of strelitzia … one hundred of cymbidiums, that’s the green ones, and another hundred of the yellow…. No? Well, make it fifty yellow, fifty pink….’

  I’d caught Luís’s eye and pointed at my empty glass.

  ‘I’ll have another galão, Luís. Got anything interesting for me today?’

  It had been a spur of the moment question. But, as he’d handed me the glass of milky coffee, his hand shook and for the second time a brown splodge disfigured the page of my diary. He’d leant forward and flicked his eyes sideways in the direction of Crumpled Suit.

  ‘There is something.…’ Another sideways flick of his eyes. ‘Três á tarde, I tell you more.’

  ‘OK, three o’clock. Will I meet you here?’ I’d said, casually lifting the glass to my lips but never letting my eyes leave his.

  Again I glimpsed that flicker of fear. ‘No. At the harbour. Meet me três á tarde at the Beerhouse on the harbour. I tell you something then.’ A quick rub of the bar top with his cloth and he’d moved away.

  Shortly afterwards I’d left for my next office hour, this time at police HQ. That unmistakable glint of fear at the back of his eyes had set my pulses racing. It was the breakthrough I’d been waiting for. Even in retrospect I felt the surge of excitement. But perhaps I had betrayed a hint of it to watching eyes…. Could I have been responsible for Luís’s death, as Comandante Figueira had suggested?

  I stared at the five names I’d jotted down on the sheet of paper. Five names. Porter-Browne, Mason, Haxby, Winterton and Grant. It could have been any of them. Or none. Luís could himself have aroused suspicion when he stumbled across whatever it was he had seen or heard….

  Comandante Figueira had demanded a list of those present. But she’d want more than that. She’d expect a list of suspects ranked in order of probability. Wearily I pushed back my chair and moved over to gaze thoughtfully out of the little window overlooking the old town wedged between the sea and the soaring cliffs, a district of cobbled streets and narrow alleys, a tumble of pantiled roofs, not so much red as burnt orange or toasted honey.

  Back at my desk I tore a sheet of notepaper into six squares and wrote a name on five. On the sixth square I drew an enigmatic black question mark to represent person or persons unknown. I spread the squares out on the desktop.

  David Grant, Exotic Flower Importer & Exporter, had to be front-runner in the field of possible suspects. His expensive gold watch, his well-manicured hands, his leather shoes spoke money, but this was at odds with his somewhat unkempt appearance. Greying hair, untidily cut, brushed the collar of a reefer jacket over open-necked denim shirt. And if I was looking for something that might tie in with drugs – these boxes of orchid flowers would be ideal for their transport and concealment.

  I swept aside desk clutter and moved the square bearing his name to the top of the cleared space. At the bottom of the space I placed Dorothy Winterton. Except in the realms of an Agatha Christie whodunit, nobody in their senses would suspect her of anything more serious than getting a free lunch by sneaking out an extra roll from the breakfast table. On the other hand.…

  Deciding on the top and bottom names had been easy. The order of the names between, that was the problem. Ten minutes later, it was still the problem. None of them could be ruled out. Flamboyant Celia Haxby, for instance, would have plenty of scope for skulduggery under the guise of eccentric artist. And could anybody really be as silly as the empty-headed Zara Porter-Browne? Resignedly, I concluded that they could. On the other hand, a razor-sharp brain might be concealed behind that gilded butterfly exterior. Charles Mason, Playboy of the Western World, was fake, false and phoney. But was he a criminal?

  What was the right order – Mason, Haxby, Porter-Browne? Haxby, Mason, Porter-Browne? Porter-Browne, Mason, Haxby?

  With an exasperated sigh I gathered up all the cards, shuffled them and placed them in a neat pile face down on the desk. One order was as good as another. So suspect Number One would be…. I turned up the top square. The black question mark stared up at me. Murder by person or persons unknown. That would have to satisfy the information-hungry comandante.

  ‘Excellent.’ The comandante’s voice was unexpectedly mellow. ‘You have done well, Officer Smith.’

  I could tell right away she was genuinely pleased. For the first time Smith had received its correct pronunciation.

  She smiled. Two neat rows of perfectly matched teeth reminded me of a crocodile about to dine on a tasty morsel. ‘But I do not think you are right in saying that we are dealing with an unknown perpetrator. No, Officer Smith, we will find the person we are looking for among the five people you have named. Of that I am sure. What you must do, my dear Officer Smith’ – the crocodile smile grew more expansive – ‘is cultivate each one individually. All are suspects. But you must discover whether in the background of one there lurks most suspicious circumstances. Everyone has his secrets. Peel away each layer like an onion. This I leave to you.’

  The perfect teeth closed with a decisive snap.

  In a bit of a gloom I went back to my rented apartment, the Casa São Jorge, on the Estrada Monumental near the Lido, a picturesque old two-storeyed house long descended into gentle decay. I’d fallen in love with this building, straight out of Hansel and Gretel and Sleeping Beauty. The passage of time and the rains of many winters had stippled a soft patina on the pale stucco walls of the old quinta. The faded dark-green shutters were peeling and flaking back to the paler green of more prosperous days, and sections of the ornamental wooden fretwork edging the steepled roof hung crazily askew, threatening to slither down to the garden below.

  I made myself a cup of tea and sat out on the veranda considering the comandante’s order. Cultivate each one individually. Everyone has his secrets. All very well in theory. In my client liaison persona it would be easy enough to engineer a chat or two, but winkling out secrets, even peccadilloes, would necessitate a lot more. I couldn’t look to her for much help. She’d made it clear she wasn’t going to allocate personnel or resources to me unless I could produce conclusive evidence that Luís’s death was tied in to drugs and the Massaroco Hotel. I would need to shadow my suspects 24/7 to have hope of spotting any suspicious behaviour. Impossible, even if I could narrow them down to the one person….

  I gazed out over the garden that was slowly reverting to a tangle of palms, magnolias, camellias and other greenery under-carpeted with ferns and clumps of luminous white Madonna lilies, the funereal kind. A shiny black seed from a neighbouring kapok tree drifted lazily by on its fluffy white parachute. I made a grab for it, but when I opened my hand there was nothing there. A metaphor for my present impasse.

  I leant back in my chair and looked up at the precipitous slopes that enclose Funchal. Sunset was flushing the tops, but far below, the darkening hillsides sparked with pinpricks of light from the white, red-tiled houses crowding up the slopes on every patch of available land. A gust of cool night air stirred the purple racemes of the wisteria that twined tightly round the veranda supports. I picked up the tea-tray and carried it indoors.

  It was time for my weekly phone call to London to check up on Gorgonzola, my red Persian cat, whose present abode during my posting to Madeira was the HMRC kennels in England. Since I’d rescued her from drowning when she was a new-born kitten, there’d been a particularly close bond between us. Once she’d proved to HM Revenue & Customs that she was the equal of any dog as a sniffer-out of drugs, she’d become a colleague as well as a pet. In my undercover work she was invaluable – for who takes notice of a moth-eaten moggy padding by? This was the first occasion we’d been parted
for more than a few days, and at first I’d been a bit worried about how she’d get on, but she seemed to be coping pretty well.

  Phone to ear, I stood in the open doorway looking out over the garden.

  ‘Hi, Mike. DJ here. Just checking up on how Gorgonzola’s doing. Been behaving herself, has she?’

  When I didn’t get the usual, ‘Everything’s fine, DJ,’ I knew something was wrong.

  ‘Erm … she’s a bit off her food. I was hoping you’d call. If you wait a minute, I’ll read you the vet’s report.’ The receiver was clunked down. A long pause, then, ‘Still there, DJ? Right, four days ago she suddenly stopped eating, lay in her bed, eyes closed. The vet says …’ – paper rustled – ‘that he can find nothing physically wrong, but that she shows all the symptoms of pining for her owner … already lost weight …’ – more rustling of paper – ‘… and there will be cause for concern if the situation continues … not refusing water yet, but if she does …’ He cleared his throat. ‘The situation today is just the same, I’m afraid. She just lies there, eyes closed. It’s as if she’s given up. What do you want us to do?’

  I hadn’t been expecting bad news, so this was all something of a shock. I found myself on the veranda sitting on the cane chair with no remembrance of how I’d got there.

  ‘Give me time to think, Mike,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you back.’

  In the few minutes that had passed since I’d carried in the tea-tray, all colour had left the sky. Fingers of grey cloud had infiltrated through the mountain passes and were creeping stealthily down, smudging out the clusters of lights crowding the hillsides above Funchal Bay. The garden beyond the veranda was a shadowy jungle of ill-defined shapes. Down at the harbour, ships’ riding lights reflected in the still black waters, and a cruise liner, all decks brightly lit, nosed its way cautiously to its berth. I took all this in, and yet it didn’t really register.

  Gorgonzola’s willpower had been evident from the moment I’d spied her, a half-drowned kitten, clinging desperately to the half-submerged log in the river. That willpower had pulled her through the days that followed. Despite all the odds, she’d survived. She was quite capable of starving herself to death, under the impression that I’d abandoned her. As I’ve said, we’d hadn’t been parted, before this, for more than a few days even when I was on a case, so to her, four weeks would be an eternity. I had no way of telling how much longer I was going to be in Madeira. It could be only a few days more, if the comandante’s patience ran out, but if I managed to uncover something interesting.…

  I made my decision. I flipped open my phone and called Mike.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Cultivate each one individually. Everyone has his secrets,’ the comandante had said. The next morning I began with Celia Haxby.

  I spotted her multi-hued smock in the gardens of the Massaroco Hotel and peered over the shoulder as she sat, brush in hand, in front of her easel.

  ‘That’s—’

  ‘Ah, Deborah, you’ve tracked me to my leetle retreat.’ Another wodge of khaki-green paint splashed onto what could only be described as a nightmarish chiaroscuro. She gazed at it for a moment, then laid down her brush and stood back. ‘Now do give me your honest opinion.’

  Her interruption gave me the chance to continue diplomatically, ‘—captured the essence of Madeira.’

  The yellow sun hat nodded in emphatic agreement.

  I pursed my lips. ‘You know, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but your style has quite a hint of … could be a.…’

  I paused, confident that Celia’s conceit would supply the answer and save me from committing myself. The pause lengthened embarrassingly.

  She was gazing up at me expectantly. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Gaugin. South Seas period,’ I said, tone confident. No other names had come to mind. ‘I’m such a novice in these matters,’ I added, to get myself off the hook if I was completely on the wrong track, ‘but I would definitely say Gaugin.’ I rushed on. ‘That – that exotic dash of colour is so …’ Words failed me to describe the clashing hues of the Haxby palette without causing offence.

  ‘Well,’ Celia simpered, lowering her eyes modestly, ‘I do think I’ve managed to capture just a leetle of the ambiance.’ She squirted half a tube of crimson onto her palette, briskly mixed in some chrome yellow and daubed randomly at the already overloaded canvas.

  ‘Aaah!’ I gasped.

  ‘Years of practice,’ she murmured.

  I seized my chance. ‘That’s just what I wanted to talk to you about. Do you think that you could possibly find time in your busy schedule to give me an interview for the monthly Visitors to Madeira feature?’

  Celia frowned. ‘I don’t…. No, I don’t really….’

  I waited. The comandante would not be satisfied if I failed at my first attempt to peel away the layers that concealed the secrets of Celia Haxby.

  That artist was studying her creation with narrowed and far from critical eyes. ‘Mmm. Gaugin, you said?’

  ‘Oh yes, Celia, definitely Gaugin,’ I gushed. ‘But Gaugin with something more … something.…’ I paused, lost again for words.

  ‘Yes?’

  Was Celia genuinely fishing for compliments, or was she slyly playing me like an expert angler with a wily fish?

  I plunged on. ‘Perhaps something of the Van Gogh, his kinetic energy, the sense of natural forces pitted against each other.’ To be honest, there really was more than a hint of the madhouse about Celia’s spectacularly awful oeuvre.

  ‘I see what you mean.’ Celia held her head to one side, considering. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me before. But yes, I agree.’ She dipped her brush in the black and signed her name with a flourish, then shot me an appraising glance. ‘It takes someone other than oneself to see the obvious, doesn’t it?’

  I nodded. But just who had been pulling the wool over whose eyes? The verdict was open on Celia Haxby, painter extraordinaire.

  I was pondering my next move when my mobile rang.

  ‘It’s Mike, DJ. I’ve just checked in Gorgonzola at Gatwick. Everything’s fine, just fine. You said the cat would get into a strop when she saw the travel box, but she let me put her in without a murmur, no bother at all.’

  My heart sank. Something was very wrong. To Gorgonzola that carrier box was like a red rag to a bull. Every time I produced it there was a battle of wills.

  ‘So there’s nothing to worry about,’ Mike was saying cheerfully. ‘She’ll be with you in about three hours.’

  Below Funchal Airport an empty pewter sea stretched emptily out to the mist-shrouded horizon where the Desertas Islands floated, insubstantial shadows on the edge of the world. A black speck drifting across under the low ceiling of cloud resolved itself into the daily British Airways flight from Gatwick. The plane banked steeply to line up with the long concrete pier of the extended runway and commenced its final approach.

  I’d just have time to make my way to the viewing terrace to see it land. There it was, nose and wing lights bright, a grey silhouette against the grey rain clouds. The twin runways, sliced out of a steep hillside dotted with red-roofed houses, seemed almost within touching distance. From where I leant on the rail of the terrace I was close enough to see the curtain of spray as the wheels touched down. With a roar of reverse-thrust the plane rolled to a stop. Gorgonzola had arrived.

  I turned and made my way anxiously down to the Customs office in the Arrivals hall. What state would she be in after those days of self-imposed starvation? I handed over the necessary papers and watched the official saunter off through a swing door, willing him to hurry. But it took longer than I’d anticipated for us to be reunited. Ten minutes, fifteen, thirty minutes passed before he reappeared carrying the regulation cat box. There was more delay as he methodically checked my papers and the pet passport.

  At last he looked up, ‘Bem, senhora.’ He handed back the papers and lifted the carrier onto the counter.

  I put my face close to the grid and said softly, ‘It’s OK
, G. I’m here now.’

  I’d hoped for the usual indignant mew of cat suffering the outrage of close confinement in hated box, but the only response was a faint thump as she shifted position. Self-abasement on my part and eating a lot of humble pie usually put things to rights after a separation, but this time, to make her feel secure and wanted would take a lot more than that well-practised routine. This time I’d have to pull out all the stops. And I’d just the thing that might do the trick, the CD of a doleful dirge-like Spanish madrelena I’d managed to track down in a music shop in Funchal. When we were in Tenerife on Operation Canary Creeper, it had become G’s favourite form of relaxation. At the first soaring notes she would roll over, paws limp, purring loudly. I’d play that CD to her on the way back to the house.

  In the twelve miles from the airport to Funchal, the via rápida dives through ten tunnels, a journey that takes the sedate airport bus forty minutes. Taxi drivers do it in twenty. Today, eager to get us back to my Hansel and Gretel cottage, I kept pace with the fastest of them, the mournful madrelena loud in my ears, setting my teeth on edge.

  Funchal is a city of narrow roads clogged by moving and stationary cars. A big advantage of the rented apartment on the Estrada Monumental was the easy parking. Two imposing wrought-iron gates welded open by rust and the luxuriant plant growth of decades gave access to a driveway paved with black and white pebbles in an intricate design. I switched off the engine, cutting off the madrelena in mid howl.

  In the blissful silence came the sound I’d been hoping for, the low rumbling purrrrrr purrrrrr of a contented cat. G and I were a team again. But I’d have to pick my moment to inform the comandante of G’s presence. I wasn’t looking forward to telling her that the HMRC agent I’d summoned to help me unpeel those onion layers of hers was a cat. But this was Saturday and the comandante wouldn’t be at her desk till Monday.